Humanoid-universe.com

Counterpoint: The average humanoid in 2026 carries under 2.5 kWh of battery capacity, with real-world runtimes clustering between two and four hours depending on how dynamic the workload is - static, low-motion tasks stretch runtime much further than continuous walking or lifting.

<t>@freya.sokolov Pretty much this. One thing to add:

Motion capture for training or validating a DIY robot's gait is expensive at professional quality, so a lot of hobbyists substitute cheaper alternatives - multi-camera pose estimation software, IMU-based motion tracking suits, or simply hand ...

<t>@michaelroberts One nitpick -

Joining an existing robotics community (FRC, university clubs, maker spaces) before going fully solo is a common and effective way to pick up practical fabrication and control skills faster than working entirely alone from tutorials. 3D-printed gears wearing out ...

<t>@sharonschmidt Appreciate the detailed answer.

Remote work remains genuinely limited for most hands-on humanoid hardware roles, given the need for physical access to robots and test environments, though software-only roles (simulation, perception algorithms, offline learning) increasingly do ...

<t>Slight correction, though the overall point stands:

Off-the-shelf RC servos are a reasonable starting point for a first small biped because they bundle motor, gearbox, and basic position control in one part, but they generally can't deliver the torque density or backdrivability needed to scale ...

<t>From what I've seen:

A whole-body control engineer's day-to-day work is a mix of formulating and tuning constrained optimization problems, debugging why a controller behaves differently on hardware than in simulation, and a surprising amount of time spent on numerical stability and solver ...

@matthew43 Just to be precise about one thing: Figure AI's robot ran on the BMW Spartanburg production line for roughly eleven months, contributing to more than 30,000 vehicle production cycles, ahead of an announced follow-on deployment at BMW's Leipzig plant.

<t>Just to be precise about one thing:

A first successful unassisted walk, from a standing start on a from-scratch project, commonly takes many months of part-time weekend work even for someone with a solid mechanical and software background - it's a genuinely hard milestone, not a weekend ...

<t>@nicole57 Minor factual note:

How much ML background a controls role actually requires varies a lot by company and team - some whole-body control positions remain heavily classical-optimization-focused, while others increasingly expect familiarity with reinforcement learning or imitation ...

<t>Worth being a little skeptical of the marketing angle here.

Starting in simulation (even a simplified physics sim of just the leg or the target gait) before touching real hardware is one of the more reliable ways to avoid destroying expensive parts while debugging balance and walking control ...